Huawei launches new NFV open lab in China

Huawei staged a launch event for its new, state-of-the-art network functions virtualization (NFV) open lab in Xi'an, China.

The lab is dedicated to developing multi-vendor integration verification capabilities, expanding joint service innovations with customers, partners and industrial organizations and accelerating development of the open ecosystem for NFV infrastructure, platforms and services, according to the company.

"The NFV open lab is an open innovation center of ICT convergence dedicated to being open and collaborative, expanding joint service innovations with partners, and developing the open ecosystem of NFV to aggregate values and help customers achieve business success," said Howard Liang, senior vice president and president of Global Technical Services, in a press release.

Operators and partners include China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, VMware, Red Hat and Canonical.

While NFV brings benefits like faster service innovation enhancements and reduced operation and maintenance (O&M) costs, operators must overcome several challenges, including ensuring multi-vendor product consistency, reliability and interoperability; tackling integration complexity; creating an optimized NFV O&M experience; and identifying new revenue streams, the company said. 

In addition to providing reliable data support for operator NFV network service planning and decision-making, Huawei says it will leverage the big data platform to develop joint solutions with industrial organizations, operators and partners to obtain certifications and authorization from cross-parties.

In November, Huawei announced the construction of an NFV lab that would allow operators and equipment manufacturers on three continents to trial NFV, software defined networking (SDN) and cloud computing technologies.

Huawei first proposed the future-oriented telecom network architecture SoftCom in 2012, incorporating advanced technologies including NFV, SDN and cloud computing.

SoftCom aims to transform the telecom industry in terms of network architecture, network functions and business and operation models. According to Huawei, it will enable telecom carriers to realize comprehensive network evolution and business transformation, create and seize new value opportunities through ICT integration, and advance an open, interconnected and innovative ecosystem to increase and better leverage aggregated industry value.

Huawei said it also works closely with industrial organizations, as well as the open source community, such as ETSI, OpenStack, OpenDaylight and OPNFV (Open Platform for NFV), to provide key technical contributions, code development and integration capabilities to support the Open NFV initiative. In the upcoming year, Huawei says it will work with more than 50 industrial partners on in-depth joint explorations.

Last year, a survey of leading telecom operators rated Huawei as a top supplier for SDN and NFV solutions for the second consecutive year, according to Current Analysis.

For more:
- see the press release
- see this Telecoms.com story
- see this PCC mobile broadband story

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